Convinced, 1957

At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented a huge error in the evolution of my family affairs. Riven with a savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two minders—one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with arms—I armed myself with myself and threw off the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not. And I did not.

Journalist, essayist, and newspaper editor, Kathryn Starbuck started writing poems in her 60s. She is the author of Griefmania (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006) and Sex Perhaps (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Best American Poetry 2008.
Though she was a practiced prose writer, it was the experience of grief that led her to writing poetry. After the deaths of her . . .